Unraveling Oranges

I only tried to paint life like a
still life – still
that week’s fingers peeled the skin off of
my reasoning, ripped
segment from segment with the rustle
of new pages, made me swallow each day
scrunched into pulpy gold and dribble
one lost drop on my history.

I remember thinking,
this must be what it is like
to eat the sun. And
you’d have thought it was summer.

It was a lost cause.

I blame
Forster’s concern with beauty,
the woof between the warp
and
the way Woolf
put it as a force
or snippets thereof.

My brush was (mis)guided thus.
I didn’t map
money or class – that would take a pencil, where
I only had the lineless
splash of aesthetics,
the tangled
overlap of threads,
a vague lack of distinction.

Of course
none of that mattered, since the subject was
all undone in the end.

Sweet God, what was
that boy’s name?
To this day, I remember him only
in shades of safety and warning, a
metaphysical ray –
unrhymability wrapped in the
saffron robes I didn’t know, a burning of
my former self,
and the instinctive pulse of hunger
that peeled my soul in a single,
snakelike coil.

To whom it may concern:
you said there was a difference
between love and hate,
but I have watched that difference unravel into
a single thread, and devour itself
like an orange.